Picking the first one allows you to proceed as far as the nearest one armed bandit, picking the second enables you to understand that anyway you were always bound to lose your shirt, picking the third at least allows you the satisfaction of knowing you saw all this coming, long, long ago.

And yet...

'Yes, as Keats asks, "who can avoid these chances". . . .'

Well, I suppose a migrant labourer or a sharecropper in the 1930s wouldn't have been able to afford the Vegas weekend package deal, especially as Bugsy Siegel and his "friends" hadn't yet carved it out of the alkali and silicates of our sacred landforms.

Ed, (and by the way, your friends here would be greatly relieved if you would sign yourself in as Ed, it's so much friendlier than Anonymous), I did know that you came from Washington, and when, and those were factors in my image selection here.

The look and the light of those row houses also brings to mind the similar urban 'scapes of Baltimore, brought over recently into the collective image mind by The Wire.

An intelligible America, impoverished in that special American Urban Impoverished Way, our gift to the historical reduction of the human.

Shelter is a really big issue for us, here, now, as we are old (actually born a little before you, I regret to admit), not well, without jobs, and literally helpless, as our ancient domicile collapses around us.

So the plight of those miserable people in the shacks and migrant housing really strikes to the heart. Having things like a roof, plumbing, wiring, it's odd how askew your whole vision of the world becomes when you lack these things. And of course a great deal of the work that has been done in this country was done by people who were systematically deprived of those amenities, which an American is meant to think of as birthright.

And that must mean that if you dwell in that state of lack you are not a proper American.

I googled you and see that you were also born....before the Atomic Bomb..

which gets me back to FDR but more precisely Mr. Harry (but that's another (..)

someone who wanted to publish some poems of mine (Imagine t h a t)

asked for my bio to go along with the poems..

born Washington, D.C. April 19, 1941

here Washington, D.C.April 19, 2010

everything in-be:tween... a blur

i have 10,000 photos heremy grandmother gave me here box camera and when i was about 12 years 3 months 4 days 16 mins old she gave me one of those Kodak plastic black Brownie Hawkeyes...

used a 3 inch Or so wide paperish film on a spool

now I got me a camera that is about as big as a postage stamp (remember postage stamps? used to put them on letters. I once sent a letter to Humphrey Bogart 1952 AND he replied with a post-card picture of himself and a nice note... in his own hand!)

played baseball on this field prior to about 1951.. I don't remember the chain-link fence.

we used to "swim" in that fountain.. Columbus Fountain

that street in front of Union Station was until a wider one was built in Moscow was the widest street in the entire world!

long about 1951 or so a run-away-train crashed through and landed inside the terminal on top of the news-stand in the concourse... the lady who was operating the stand went to the bathroom just minuets before the wreck

I betcha that there are lots of photos 'out there' it was front page on The Daily News, The Times Herald and The Washington post